In the POTA Discord, Charlie N4IIT asked
A bit off topic, but I’d love to hear more about how you think about the QRP skill set. I hear this a lot but I’m not 100% sure what folks mean. I want to understand, though, because I want to be a better QRP operator!
This is a truly excellent question, and I’ve taken my answer and fleshed it out a bit here.
The basis of what I think of as the QRP skill set is rooted in some observations about what you need to complete a QSO.
To complete a QSO, you need the following:
Things I’ve figured out since I started working QRP in earnest:
If you’re running 100W or more into a well implemented full size antenna system with a good feed system, you can successfully make contacts even when propagation isn’t working in your favor. That’s why so many hams are running FT8 on 100W when they’re chasing DX.
But when you cut the power level to 5-10W, and you are using an antenna optimized for portability and ease of deployment rather than maximum radiation efficiency and directivity/gain, you can’t just power your way through any hurdles. You can no longer afford to ignore the fact that propagation in the morning is different from late afternoon or after dark.
You have to learn how to exploit times of good propagation and save your energy and time when conditions are unfavorable, and you have to learn how to find the opportunities even when conditions seem to be stacked against you.
Most of the time, even when conditions are terrible and some bands are closed, if you pick the right band you can get your signal out to some place. You just need to be able to figure out which band, and where your signal is going to fall.
Part of that skill set can be acquired by playing with propagation forecasting tools like VOACAP and using it to see how the seasonal and daily cycles affect where your signal will land. And some of that skill set can be earned by sitting down at your radio, transmitting test signals, and using tools like pskreporter, Reverse Beacon Network, and wspr.rocks to see where you’re being spotted and what your signal strength is like across the face of the planet.
Once you’re operating QRP, you can no longer ignore the signal reports you get when doing an activation. Knowing what your signal is like at the other end becomes a vital bit of information that lets you build an experience base so you know what bands to use at what times of day, during different times of the year.
SSB is by far the most popular mode in terms of the size of the pool of POTA hunters as well as the size of the pool of POTA activators.
That said, when operating QRP, you can’t just say to yourself “Hey, if I work SSB I’ll be chased by this huge horde of hunters, so life will be easy”, because when you’re QRP many of those hunters will be outside your signal footprint, because SSB is simply not very efficient in terms of power - 5W SSB simply won’t get your signal out as well as more efficient modes like CW, PSK31, or FT8/FT4. So CW is very popular for activators who want to exploit the portability advantages of QRP operating, and data modes like FT8 are popular as well.
But geography plays a role as well, because if you’re in the middle of an area with a high density of hams, you can get your signal to those hams pretty easily. Thomas Witherspoon K4SWL has done POTA activations with a little as 100mW into a very compromised antenna - but he was in western North Carolina, smack in the middle of the high density of hams on the eastern half of the US. He might have a tougher time pulling that off if he did an activation in, say, Montana or North Dakota.
Most of the time, I’m in the Pacific Northwest of the US. Half of my signal footprint lands in the Pacific Ocean, one quarter lands in sparsely populated Western Canada, and the remaining quarter is spread out over the US, and a band like 40M that’s useful for shorter ranges will not reach out beyond the middle of the US into the highly dense population of hams east of the Mississippi River. If you’re in Louisville, KY, you can fire things up on 40m and your signal footprint neatly matches that huge dense region, problem solved.
So when I’m doing a POTA activation, and particularly when I’m working QRP, I have to be very aware of how propagation for the various ham bands varies seasonly and daily, so that I can choose the band that gives me the best shot of having hams inside my signal footprint.
And also, QRP is sometimes slow, so if you’re going to be sitting on a hard or cold surface (picnic table, say) a soft cushion can make life better.
Most of us live in houses in proximity to other people’s houses. All of those houses contain various electronic and electric devices which are generators of RF noise. That means that one of the handicaps we face when we work from our home shack is a higher noise floor.
One big advantage of operating portable is that often (not always, but often), we get to play radio in an environment where the noise floor is very low, because all the power lines and houses and offices filled with noise generating computers are far away. The difference can be dramatic. I’ve set up in parks where the noise floor was so low, I had to double check to make sure I had connected the antenna feedline.
That low noise floor means you can hear much weaker signals. And the other operators who are activating parks may well also be in spots where their local noise floor is very low. That means that you, in your park in western Washington state with your little radio pushing 10W into a end fed halfwave, actually have a very good chance that you’ll be able to complete a QSO with another ham way out in a low noise floor park in Virginia, who’s also running just 5W into a quarter-wave vertical. Or even successfully make contacts with hams in New Zealand, or Australia.
By this, I mean that when you call CQ, your signal will propagate well in some directions, and poorly in others. This can be problematic in the situation where I’m traveling away from home, and I set up my peerie QRP radio and EFHW strung up on a 30’ mast, and try to make contact with my CW code buddy for my thrice weekly 7:00AM CW ragchew. If the gods of propagation favor us, we can make contact, but if my code buddy is in a null of my antenna pattern instead of a lobe, we’re out of luck.
This is not at all the situation when you’re activating a park. In the park, you’re the DX, by which I mean that many hams will be seeing you spotted on the spotting page, and they’ll be spinning their VFO knob to see if they can pick your weak signal out of the noise. Even better, they may well be expecting that your signal will be weak, and they’ll deploy every trick they know to strain your signal out of the RF soup, turning their big beam antenna on the tower, tweaking the filters on their receiver, all just to hear the faint beeps that come from your radio.
The fact that your signal doesn’t reach everyone doesn’t matter to you nearly as much, now. What matters is that your signal reaches enough hams who are trying to find you, strongly enough that when they deploy every trick they know, they can hear you and respond to your CQ call.
The difference is dramatic. At home, you might call CQ for quite a while before someone answers, even if you are operating QRO. In the park, there might be hundreds of hams seeing your spot and then spinning the VFO to see if they can hear you. Even when you’re operating QRP from a geographically disfavored spot, it’s not uncommon to get a pileup of hams all calling you at once.
I’m a sucker for watching youtube videos of CW activations. One of the things I’ve noticed is that the outstanding QRP operators operate with empathy, by which I mean that they seem to be more or less constantly considering what their signal sounds like to the operator on the other end of the QSO, and doing whatever they can to arrange things so the other operator can glean the information they need from the weak signal they’re receiving.
A great example is a common tactic used by POTA hunters to make their response to a CQ call stand out - they never zero beat their frequency to the calling station. If every hunter tunes to exactly the frequency of the activating station calling CQ, what the activator hears when two or more stations respond at the same time is just a continuous beeeeep, as the dits and dahs of the two stations blend together into one single tone.
By calling on a frequency very slightly offset from the activator, the hunter stands a much better chance of being heard. And the clever hunters listen as they send their callsign, trying to figure out of someone else is offset just the same amount as they are, and if so, the next time they send their callsign, they’ll have shifted just a bit, hoping to find a clear spot where their callsign can be heard.
If other stations in the region where the other operator is located are giving signal reports like 339, or 319, they will slow down and add redundancy to what they send. Instead of sending “GA UR 529 WA BK”, they might send “GA UR 529 529 529 WA WA WA BK” adding extra Farnsworth spacing to make copy easier for the op on the other end. If they’re hearing a lot of fading on signals from a certain region (or all regions) they become much more persistent when they don’t hear a response, because it’s much more likely the other op simply didn’t hear you, as opposed to the other op just bailing on the QSO.
The very best operators seem to have some sort of uncanny ESP that tells them what the other operator is experiencing, and they have a big bag of tricks to deploy to help that operator complete the QSO.
And if the operator on the other end is deploying all her tricks to help you, the odds that the two of you will pull off a complete QSO improve dramatically, even if the two of you are hearing signals that a less attentive op might not even notice.
When you’re using a field radio and a field expedient antenna out in a park, it’s often the case that many of the callers you hear will be strong signals, because the hunters working from home might be running 1500W into a Yagi at 100ft AGL.
But it’s also often the case that a caller’s signal will be quite weak, and that’s the moment when knowing how to do things like small filter adjustments, adjusting RF gain, deploying DSP noise reduction &c might mean the difference between completing the QSO and not pulling it off.
Thomas Witherspoon, K4SWL, is widely known by POTA enthusiasts because of his excellent videos on YouTube. As a result, there are a lot of hams who have his callsign in their hamspots list, and so all of them have their cell phone notify them when Thomas is spotted doing a POTA activation. The result is that a large pool of hunters immediately rush to their radio, hoping to get Thomas in their log. That means that while some of us get single callers every couple of minutes, Thomas gets a more or less instant pileup. (side note: watching Thomas work a pileup is an eye opening experience)
We can’t all be famous, because if everyone is famous, then no one is famous. But we can do things to become what I think of as ‘locally famous’, by which I mean we can cultivate a pool of hunters who put us in their hamspots list and actively seek to connect when they see us doing a POTA activation.
One thing I see really great operators do is keep track of the callsigns in your logs, and indicate that you recognize them when they call you. Knowing their name so you can respond to “N7JTT” with “GA JOHN” instead of just “GA”, saying “thank you”, sounding enthusiastic when working SSB - all those practices make it more likely that the ham on the other end will remember you, remember your callsign, and will think “Oh, look, it’s Paul activating Stillwater State Wildlife area again, I’ll see if I can hear him.” Being the activator that hunters remember improves the odds that those hams will become frequent fliers who are actively trying to hunt you whenever and wherever you do an activation.
The more activations you do, the more often your callsign is seen by the pool of POTA hunters. Even a simple thing like becoming known for doing at least one activation every day can make you famous - one example I can think of is Jim Vaughn, WB0RLJ, who does an activation every day, very often at US-4011 Chalco Hills.
If your logging software can help you out with names, just putting the hunter’s name in your response can improve the odds they’ll try to hunt you at your next activation, and the one after that. Out of such small acts are friendships forged.